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Murphy Lives...Then Dies... Then Lives

Oh, isn't that the way of it? So, after almost two months of extreme business, I finally replaced the old leaky / slippy 3spd auto tranny in the $500 T-Wag. A few weeks ago, while I was bolting the torque converter to the torque converter plate, you guessed it, I dropped a wrench into the space between. And I was thinking just before it happened that I shouldn't be using this wrench cause it might slip out of my tranny fluid soaked hand. So I had to disassemble everything to get the wrench... and the magnet I was trying to use to fish the wrench out that also got stuck in the dreaded auto-tranny black hole. I HAtE it when repairs go backwards.

So last week-end I get Murphy running. The New(er) tranny works really well. No leaksfile:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICHAE%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image001.gif That was a Saturday (9:30pm) just before my band was scheduled to play. I'm surprised I didn't smash my fingers. Well Monday came around and I went to the Calif Board of Equalization to pay my five months overdue sales tax for my company (ppol / spa mnt. repair). On the way home I started to smell that thick sweet smell that screams hose or radiator leak. The engine got very hot before I could get home (seems to be no damage from that). Well, the leaky culprit just can't be something easy like one of the main radiator hoses; the leaky hose has to be the one underneath the turbofile:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CMICHAE%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image002.gif So I had to take out turbo to change the hose. Sad thing is that I had meant to replace that hose when I was swapping engines and forgot to do so. Paid the price on that one.

But Murphy is running good. The next little thing is that from a stop, the engine feels a bit sluggish upon acceleration. I doesn't hiccough, it just doesn't want to go right away. Once up to speed the car runs great. It feels a bit like a slight vacuum leak though I can't hear it when the engine is running. I'm going to check the timing again, as the old tranny might not have been putting enough drag on the engine when timing the disty, thus throwing off the timing a bit. Could it be a bad lifter? I do hear a slight tick while driving. Any thoughts?

Do you have an ECU in that model? I think so, not sure, but I know they take a while to get 'adjusted' to your driving before they do their best with the engine. Don't trust me on this, I don't know what I"m talking about.